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In theory, it doesn't. In practice, a lot of data ends up being needlessly copied in a lot of software, for various reasons (devs don't care; their superiors don't care; it's the easiest way to abstract it; overlooked bugs; it's for some legacy feature; it's useful for very unlikely cases). It's a waste of processing power, and thus a waste of energy.

In computing pi, the method is much more important than the value. Without further details, I don't know if the programmer's method is novel, but perhaps the implementation is.

The value itself is of little use, except that there is still no answer to the question whether pi follows a pattern, beyond being irrational and transcedental. Keep in mind that the Champernowne constant is irrational and transcedental too, but follows a relatively simple pattern.

Let's go back to the Sinclair model: we assemble our own gizmos. Really, it's more fun than unboxing, and it gives an opportunity for the geeks to interact with people who can't assemble the things by themselves.

I have seen many people struggling to learn PHP (as part of their education). Not because they had any issues with the language itself, but because they couldn't systematically approach their problem. And if you would have read the TFA, or even simply peeked at the pictures, you would have seen that this IDE is almost a glorified code coloring editor, where words of code fit together like jigsaw pieces.

The art of programming is actually the art of reverse-engineering: you put your program together like you take your solution apart. If you don't know how to carefully dissect your ideas, then you are not a programmer.

By serving 40% of your malicious users with a delay, you actually spend more resources (mostly memory) on trolls. Sure, in 60% of the cases, you spend nearly nothing, but it sure opens possibilities for DDoS attacks: open accounts, troll a lot, get miserable and simply troll harder.